“plotless”

That was a nice two-day interlude with Farewell, My Lovely, I guess my third or fourth reading of that novel– and I almost never reread fiction. I simply reread Chandler whenever I feel like spending some time with Philip Marlowe, and I feel that wish once every so often.

I still think Chandler’s plots don’t always make complete sense, and I still don’t care. In this novel in particular, there are a couple of “tie up the loose ends” conversations between a couple of characters, and a few things still make no sense to me. But again, I don’t really care. It’s just fun to hang out with Marlowe and drift with him from one incident to the next.

This was Chandler’s favorite of his seven completed novels, and I have a theory as to why. The Big Sleep was his first, and made famous enough by Bacall & Bogart. But I find that it’s one I seldom reread. It’s somehow not completely Chandler yet, in my opinion. I have a theory that he’s still mildly stuck in a genre in the first novel, but already in the second is breaking out of it a bit, and thereafter you have the real Chandler. I think he felt this, and that that’s why the second novel was such a special one for him.